Reading multiple stories about how AI demand has made hard drive, GPU and RAM prices all skyrocket, I decided to pull the trigger and upgrade my laptop to something that will handle video editing better than the one I’ve currently got. This is an M2 Macbook Air that I bought three years ago, and I made the mistake of only speccing 8GB of RAM. It’s been a solid machine, but it has a few quirks I dislike (mainly software-related) and it just chugs when I’m working with heavy video files. I specced out a new M5 Air with 16GB of RAM last week, and with a trade in on my current machine I should save about 1/3 of the total cost. However, the order is currently stuck in processing—what was supposed to be in stock locally is now estimated to be here between May 15-19.

Interestingly, when I look at the stats for IK here, my daily numbers have jumped up to about four times where they used to be a year ago, and when I compare that with the Scout journal, those numbers have dropped. My guess (and I need to do a lot more digging in my server logs) is that I’m getting hit by the AI bots, who are scraping the site for content. I would have expected that the Scout journal would be hit just as much, but apparently not.

I’ve had the drumbeat and bassline of Angel by Massive Attack stuck in my head for the last three days. I was fortunate enough to see them live in 2019 during the Mezzanine 30th Anniversary tour, and this was more powerful in person than the recorded version, if that’s possible. Being able to see Horace Andy and Liz Fraser sing their tracks live was incredible.